Habyarimana was returning to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, from Tanzania on the evening of April 6, 1994 with Cyprien Ntaryamira, the president of Burundi. The two had just wrapped up discussions about implementing the Arusha Accords, a deal to end Rwanda’s three-year civil war. The war had fallen largely, but not entirely, along ethnic lines, pitting Hutu, Rwanda’s largest ethnic group, against Tutsi. The two groups shared many similarities, including a common language and many common traditions, and they lived in the same towns and villages. Belgium, the colonial power in Rwanda, had given Tutsis an upper hand in both politics and business, which bred resentment with Hutus. After Rwanda gained independence in 1962, Hutus dominated the government. As part of the Arusha Accords, Habyarimana, who was a Hutu, was set to end his two-decade rule by swearing in a transitional government upon his return. But as his plane neared Kigali’s airport it crashed, landing (oddly enough) on the grounds of the presidential residence.

The international community did not, however, choose to stand and fight. Belgium quickly withdrew its remaining troops. The UN Security Council soon followed suit, voting unanimously on April 21 to withdraw all but 270 troops. General Roméo Dallaire of Canada, the commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, was blunt about what he witnessed and failed to stop:

Rwanda will never leave me: it’s in the pores of my body. We saw lots of them dying, and lots of those eyes still haunt me—angry eyes, innocent eyes. They’re looking at me with my blue beret, and they’re saying, ’What in the hell happened?’ ... And they’re absolutely right: How come I failed? How come my mission failed?"

If the international community would not save Rwanda, the Tutsi-dominated RPF would. It broke the ceasefire within twenty-four hours of Habyarimana’s death. RPF troops slowly rolled back Hutu forces, finally capturing Kigali on July 4. In the course of three months, as many as 800,000 Rwandans had been killed.

When I wake up every morning and look at the headlines and the stories and the images on television of these conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict. I want to work to save every child out there. And I know the president does, and I know the American people do. But neither we nor the international community have the resources nor the mandate to do so. So we have to make distinctions. We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can intervene. And the reality is that we cannot often solve other people’s problems; we can never build their nations for them.

The horror of the Rwandan genocide helped spur interest in the notion of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the idea that countries have an obligation to intervene to protect people against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The UN endorsed the R2P concept at the 2005 World Summit, and the UN Security Council reaffirmed the obligation in 2006. As recent events in Darfur, Sudan, and Syria all show, however, the UN and its member states continue to have trouble translating R2P from ideal into reality.